Biologist
Tim Stearns has been selected as Stanford's first
Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Professor. He
is one of 20 professors from 19 universities whose
appointments were announced by the Maryland-based
biomedical research institute on Sept. 18. All are
tenured faculty with a keen interest in improving
undergraduate science education.

"Each
is a leading researcher who will receive $1 million
over the next four years to bring the creativity they
have shown in the lab to the undergraduate
classroom," HHMI officials said.

Teaching
of undergraduates tends to be undervalued at research
universities, noted HHMI Vice President Peter J.
Bruns. "We want the HHMI Professors to
demonstrate that active, productive scientists can be
effective teachers too," he added.

Stearns
and the other appointees are the first to hold HHMI
professorships. They were chosen from among 150
nominees.

'Pre-grad'
program

An
associate professor of biological sciences and of
genetics, Stearns will use his HHMI endowment to
create a "pre-grad" program at Stanford
that is similar to established pre-med programs on
campus.

"Undergraduates
who want to become doctors usually major in
biology," HHMI officials noted. "These
'pre-meds' make up the majority of biology majors at
most universities."

Stearns'
pre-grad program is designed to overcome that bias by
recruiting and training undergraduates who are
interested in science and technology but who might
have been turned off to biology with a pre-med focus.

"Premier
research institutions in this country don't make full
use of their potential for training undergraduates to
be practicing scientists," Stearns explained.
"This is partly because of a lack of resources
to support teaching by talented faculty and partly
because the teaching mission tends to focus on the
large numbers of pre-med students."

The
pre-grad program will offer a new course on the
methods and logic of biological experimentation using
the primary literature of scientific journals rather
than textbooks. Students will take part in a project
lab conducted by research faculty and will
participate in a summer of research between their
junior and senior years. They also will have the
opportunity to attend scientific conferences and meet
working scientists involved in academic research,
biotechnology, the pharmaceutical industry,
publishing and government.

Inspirational
teachers

Stearns'
undergraduate experience at Cornell University
inspired his pre-grad plan. "I worked with Tom
Fox on his studies of mitochondria in yeast cells. It
was an exciting experience and made me decide to get
a Ph.D. in biology," he noted.

In
graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Stearns worked with David Botstein, now a
professor of genetics at Stanford, whom he credits
with shaping his interest in teaching. "David
emphasized the relationship between teaching and
research," Stearns recalled. "The idea that
research and teaching are separate endeavors is
artificial -- the experience of teaching helps you to
do better science."

A cell
biologist, Stearns' research focuses on the
relationship between the cell cycle and the
cytoskeleton. Associate editor of the journals Genetics
and Molecular Biology of the Cell, he is
also a recipient of Stanford's Dean's Award for
Distinguished Teaching.

"The
feeling of being on the edge of the unknown -- that
is what research is all about," Stearns
observed. "In most undergraduate labs,
particularly at large universities, students are just
repeating experiments someone else already did many
years ago. That isn't science."